THE COMMONWEALTH WAR GRAVES COMMISSION – Summary of Eran’s talk presented by Elkan D Levy
The well-known First World War historian Eran Tearosh spoke about the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) to Netanya AACI on 9 February. Many in the audience were not aware of the history of the CWGC and of those who are buried in the Holy Land.
Until the First World War little account was taken of soldiers who had fallen in battle. Leading Generals were sometimes commemorated, but the ordinary soldier died without memorial, without any record of when or where he had fallen, and without any real indication to his family of what had happened.
The enormous casualties that emerged on the Western front in 1915 and 1916 required commemoration, and in due course the CWGC was established to record what had happened and to bury or record the fallen with dignity. The reach and involvement of the CWGC worldwide is quite amazing. There are over 25,000 cemeteries worldwide, and within Israel there are 29 places where dead from the World Wars are buried. The main cemetery on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, designed to overlook the Old City, also contains a memorial to those who went missing during Allenby’s conquest in 1917 and 1918.
The large cemetery at Ramleh contains Graves from both World Wars and also from Mandate Palestine, including (famously) a Private Harry Potter, and the two Sergeants Martin and Paice hanged by the Irgun in Netanya Two cemeteries are in the Gaza Strip and perhaps the most moving moment of the evening was a video showing Israeli soldiers during the current war going to a Jewish grave in Deir el Balah and reciting Kaddish.
This was a most interesting evening about a subject that is generally not well known.
